Farewell, Dominic Deegan

On Friday, May 24th, I read the last comic for Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire. It’s a long-running webcomic that I’ve read for years, generally five days a week. It started out as almost a gag-a-day comic with limited storylines and grew into an epic about the fate of the world. It centered on the title character, Dominic Deegan, a seer and oracle whose visions would lead him to one adventure after another. Whether it was as simple as solving a murder or as complicated as teaching a university class on divination, every story got better and better, widened the world, and deepened the characters.

I have a list of comics I go through regularly, and usually just open all the tabs at once and page through them in turn. Today, when I got to the Dominic Deegan tab, I found a thank-you message for the fans. On Friday, when I saw the 3,000th strip, I was thinking the end of the comic had sunk in. I knew it was coming, after all. But it’s actually only becoming real today, when I automatically loaded the comic and saw that thank-you. Eleven years have come to an end.

If you’ve never read the strip, I recommend trying it out. It may not be for everyone, and I’d put a mild maturity warning on it for some of my audience, but I obviously enjoyed it. The ending was also one of the best I’ve ever encountered: the perfect blend of confirming the end while acknowledging other stories, all in the context of showing a happy marriage. That might be a spoiler for some people, but we all like happy endings.

Farewell, Dominic, Luna, Spark, Gregory, Quilt, and all the rest. I’ll see you in the archives.

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1) A person who uses subtlety and a vast array of skills to bring out the best in a story, preferably when the audience least expects it. E.g.: an editor.
2) A blog run by freelance editor Matthew Bowman, focused on advice for writers and reviews for readers.

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